Creating the New Earth Together

Venus: The Morning Star/Mazzaroth/Lucifer/Satan/Baal/Beelzebub

We inhabit a planet that has undergone radical and traumatic change in the past, and we are in the danger zone chronologically for a revisit of comet debris from outer space. Things have not always been as quiet and stable on Earth as they appear now. In our historical past, for example, Venus was once a comet that legends tell horrific stories about. All of the names listed in the caption above are names by which the once-comet-now-planet Venus, thought to be born out of Jupiter, was called.

The story – as told in ancient legends and retold by Immanuel Velikovsky in his 1950 heavily documented masterpiece of exhaustive research Worlds In Collision – tells of swarms of flies and other insects that plagued, not only the Egyptians in the story of the Exodus, but peoples everywhere on the planet in the wake of comet Venus’ tail as it passed so close to the earth that it scorched its surface and wreaked havoc to the planet. Venus was thus dubbed “Beelzebub, Lord of the flies” for this reason.

When Venus sprang out of Jupiter as a comet and flew very close to the earth, it became entangled in the embrace of the earth. The internal heat developed by the earth and the scorching gases of the comet were in themselves sufficient to make the vermin of the earth propagate at a very feverish rate. Some of the plagues, like the plague of the frogs (“the land brought forth frogs”) or of the locusts, must be ascribed to such causes. Anyone who has experienced a khamsin (sirocco), an electrically charged wind blowing from the desert, knows how, during the few days that the wind blows, the ground around the villages begins to teem with vermin.

The question arises here whether or not the comet Venus infested the earth with vermin which it may have carried in its trailing atmos­phere in the form of larvae together with stones and gases. It is significant that all around the world peoples have associated the planet Venus with flies. . . .

Modem biologists toy with the idea that microorganisms arrive on the earth from interstellar spaces, carried by the pressure of light. Hence, the idea of the arrival of living organisms from interplanetary spaces is not new. Whether there is truth in this supposition of larval contamination of the earth is anyone’s guess. The ability of many small insects and their larvae to endure great cold and heat and to live in an atmosphere devoid of oxygen renders not entirely im­probable the hypothesis that Venus (and also Jupiter, from which Venus sprang) may be populated by vermin.

Baal Zevuv (Beelzebub)

The beautiful Morning Star was related to Ahriman, Seth, Lucifer, name equivalents of Satan. It was also Baal of the Canaanites and of the Northern Kingdom of the Ten Tribes, the god hated by the biblical prophets, also Beelzebub or Baal Zevuv, or Baal of the fly.

In the Pahlavi text of the Iranian book, the Bundahis, describing the catastrophes caused by celestial bodies, it is written that at the close of one of the world ages “the evil spirit [Ahriman] went toward the luminaries.” “He stood upon one-third of the inside of the sky, and he sprang, like a snake, out of the sky down to the earth.” It was the day of the vernal equinox. “He rushed in at noon,” and “the sky was shattered and frightened.” “Like a fly, he rushed out upon the whole creation, and he injured the world and made it dark at midday as though it were in dark night. And noxious creatures were diffused by him over the earth, biting and venomous, such as the snake, scorpion, frog, and lizard, so that not so much as the point of a needle remained free from noxious creatures.”

Then the Bundahis proceeds: “The planets, with many demons [comets], dashed against the celestial sphere, and they mixed the constellations; and the whole creation was as disfigured as though fire disfigured every place and smoke arose over it.”

A similar plague of vermin is described in the Scriptures, in Exodus, Chapters 8 to 10, and also in Psalm 78 where it is told that there were sent “divers sorts of flies among them [the people of Egypt], which devoured them; and frogs, which destroyed them. (From Worlds In Collision)

Fear reigned in the hearts of the people

Comet Venus, which cycled back toward Earth about every fifteen years, was greatly feared by the people who had survived the first cataclysmic upheaval in the second millennium before the present era and had begun to rebuild their lives and human civilization. Venus was watched by astronomers and fearful humans across the globe for changes in its movement in the heavens. I’ll let Velikovsky tell it in his own words:

Velikovsky

“The earth and the water without which we cannot exist suddenly turned into enemies and engulfed the animal kingdom, the human race included, and there was no shelter and no refuge. In such cataclysms the land and the sea repeatedly changed places, laying dry the kingdom of the ocean and submerging the kingdoms of the land.” (Velikovsky, Earth In Upheaval)

The movements of Venus were carefully watched by the ancient astronomers of Mexico, India, Iran, and Babylonia. Temple observatories for the cult of the planets were built in both hemispheres. The bamot or “high places” so often mentioned in the Scriptures were observatories as well as places for offerings to the planet-gods, chiefly Venus (Baal). On these high places idolatrous priests, ordained by the erring kings of Judah, burned incense to Baal, to the sun and the moon, and to the planets. . . .

As long as Venus returned at regular intervals, fear of the planet was kept in bounds, when the star passed without causing harm, as it had already done for a few centuries, the people were calmed and felt themselves out of danger for another period. But when Venus, for some reason, began to move irregularly, fear grew intense.

The priests of Iran prayed:

We sacrifice to Tistrya, the bright and glorious star, for whom long flocks and herds and men, looking forward for him and deceived in their hope: When shall we see him rise up, the bright and glorious star Tistrya?

The Zend-Avesta answered for the star:

If men would worship me with a sacrifice in which I were invoked by my own name then I should come to the faithful at the appointed time.

The priests responded:

The next ten nights, 0 Spitama Zarathustra! the bright and glorious Tistrya mingles his shape with light, moving in the shape of a golden-horned bull.

They glorified the star that made “all the shores of the ocean boiling over, all the middle of it boiling over.” They heaped up sacrifices to the star, imploring it not to change its course.

We sacrifice unto Tistrya, the bright and glorious star who from the shining east moves along his long winding course, along the path made by the gods. . . .

We sacrifice unto Tistrya the bright and glorious star, whose rising is watched by the chiefs of deep understanding.

The star of Venus did not appear in the prescribed seasons. In the Book of Job the Lord asks him: “Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season …? Knowest thou the changes of heaven?” 11

11 Job 38: 32-33. The King James translation has, “Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven?” The Septuagint has “the changes of heaven.”

The Science of Mazzaroth

The ancients read the stars and governed according to the signs and seasons – the ordinances – of the heavenly bodies, their risings and their settings. That science was generally lost, only later to be replaced by what we know today as astrology, a rather distorted and poor imitation of this ancient astronomical science and art. This may be the reason, as the author indicates below, for the uncertainty of its meaning.

There exists an extensive exegetic literature on this Mazzaroth from which it can be concluded only that “the meaning of Mazzaroth is uncertain.” But the Vulgate (Latin) translation of the Bible has Lucifer for Mazzaroth. The (Greek) translation of the Seventy (Septuagint) reads: “Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season and guide the Evening Star by his long hair?” These words of the Septuagint seem very strange. I have already mentioned that the Greek word komet means “the long-haired one,” or a star with hair, a comet. In Latin, coma is “hair.”

Venus ceased to appear in its seasons. What had happened?

Venus Becomes the Morning Star

Since the latter part of the eighth century before the present era, Venus has followed an orbit between Mercury and Earth, which it has maintained ever since. It became the Morning and Evening Star. Seen from the earth, it is never removed more than 48 degrees (when at its eastern and western elongation) or three hours and a few minutes east or west of the sun. The dreaded comet became a tame planet. It has the most nearly circular orbit among the planets.

The end of the terror which Venus kept alive for eight centuries after the days of the Exodus was the inspiration for Isaiah when he said:

“How art thou fallen from heaven, 0 Lucifer, son of the morning! How art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God.”

Septuagint [Greek Bible]and Vulgate [LatinBible] both translate Morning Star or Lucifer. What does it mean, that the Morning Star was assailing the heavens and rising high, and that it was cut down low to the horizon, and would weaken no more the nations?

More than a hundred generations of commentators have occupied themselves with this passage, but have met with failure.

Why, it is also asked, should the beautiful Morning Star, called Lucifer, the Light Bearer, live in the imagination of peoples as an evil power, a fallen star? What is in this lovely planet that makes her name an equivalent of Satan, or Seth of the Egyptians, the dark power? In his confusion, Origen wrote this question to the quoted verses of Isaiah: “Most evidently by these words is he shown to have fallen from heaven, who formerly was Lucifer, and who used to arise in the morning. For if, as some think, he was a nature of darkness, how is Lucifer said to have existed before? Or how could he arise in the morning, who had in himself nothing of the light?”

Lucifer was a feared prodigy in the sky, and its origin, as illuminated in this book, explains how it came to be regarded as a dark power and a fallen star.

After a great struggle, Venus achieved a circular orbit and a permanent place in the family of planets. During the perturbations which brought about this metamorphosis, Venus also lost its cometary tail.

In the valley of the Euphrates, “Venus then gives up her position as a great stellar divinity, equal with sun and moon, and joins the ranks of the other planets.”

A comet became a planet.

Venus was born as a comet in the second millennium before the present era. In the middle of that millennium it twice made contact with the earth and changed its cometary orbit. In the tenth to eighth centuries of the first millennium, it was still a comet. What caused such further changes in the motion of Venus in the first millennium that it became a planet on a circular orbit? (From Worlds In Collision)

The answer is Mars, which I will write about in my next post. Until then, here’s wishing you a Happy and Healthy New Year !

Velikovsky’s References for this excerpt :Schiaparelli, Astronomy in the Old T’estament, p. 74; Cambridge Bible, Book of Job, by A. B. Davidson and H. C. Lanchester; J.S. Suschken, Unvorgreifliche Kometen-Gedanken: Ob der Kometen in der’heiligen Schrift gedacht werde? (1744); and Isaiah 14 : 12-13); The Writings of Origen, “De principiis” (transl. F. Crombie, 1869), p. 51.; A. Jeremias, The Old Testament in the Light of the Ancient East (1911). I, 18.; Zend-Avesta (transI. Darmesteter ), Pt. II, pp. 94 ff. The belief sometimes expressed, that Tistrya is Sirius, is an obvious error: Sirius does not travel in a winding course. The star in the shape of a golden-homed bull was Venus. Also, inaccurate movements of Sirius could not occur without similar irregularity on the part of all the stars; Job 38: 32-33. The King James translation has, “Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven?” The Septuagint has “the changes of heaven.”